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Quirk writes "NewScientist is reporting on..."Software to be launched in January will let PC users run as many "distributed computing" projects as they like. The program will let PC users search for aliens, help predict climate change and perform advanced biological research - all at the same time."'It is called the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). BOINC acts like a software platform that can run a number of screen-saver style applications on top of the PC's own operating system.'"

Even though you *can* do multiple projects at one time, you have to run seperate applications (if I'm correct) so this would be a good integration into one application that handles multiple projects and allows your machine to be used more efficiently.

I belive the great achievement will come when it supports multi processors. I don't know much about clustering, but is it possible to run a program like that on a Linux cluster for example ? And how about those Intel Hyper Threading processors ?

I was interested in the folding protein project, but are the results open to the public (like the human geneome project) free of charge, or will someone making a buck off *my* computing power?

With all the distributed computing projects out there be sure to read the fine print, if your going to use your computer for a project make sure its helping everyone instead of a few corporations make $.

Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site."

"Keeping track of how much work everybody has done is one of the prime motivations," says Anderson. BOINC checks this by farming out each problem twice and comparing the results. "If the answers are different we have to assume that one of those parties may have cheated," he says.

So the whole work has to be done twice for the sake of correctness. I think they should introduce some trusted user mode, let's say, so that results from users who have invested a certain amount of cpu time should be trusted or at least not every received result double checked. Just every n'th packet or so and if it's invalid they have to recheck all unchecked packets. I guess this would reduce double work a lot as there is normaly only a minority of users who's trying to cheat.Does this sound sane?

I think they should introduce some trusted user mode, let's say, so that results from users who have invested a certain amount of cpu time should be trusted [...]

How do you know how much CPU time a user invested? That's also information submitted by the user that you cannot trust.

Unless of course the "trusted user mode" involves requiring the user to run the software on some sort of "trusted" computer, Microsoft Palladium style. In that case you might be able to save 50% computing time, but I suppose at

I've always had some mild reservations about running the closed-source SETI code, but convinced myself it wasn't an unreasonable exposure. A meta-app that exists to download yet more closed-source code without telling me... nope, that's over the line. Sorry, lil' green guy, but this is too much to ask.

A meta-app that exists to download yet more closed-source code without telling me... nope, that's over the line.

The SETI@home (under boinc) source code [berkeley.edu] is available under the GPL. The AstroPulse code should be available shortly. Yes, now you can see how bad my code really is.

What you won't get with the code is our code signing key (which is under lock and key on an isolated machine) or the ability to distribe your version from our servers, but you are welcome to compile versions for use on your machines and/or distribute your own versions. We won't guarantee to anyone that your version doesn't erase harddrives or distribute child porn, though.

Using "quotation marks" in the "wrong places" makes everything you "say" seem "suspicious".. Like you're trying to "pull one over" on the "reader" by insinuating theres a double "meaning" to the "word" in "quotes"..

Hate to be a grammar Nazi, but, the the whole quotation mark thing is a pet peeve.:)

Using "quotation marks" in the "wrong places" makes everything you "say" seem "suspicious".. Like you're trying to "pull one over" on the "reader" by insinuating theres a double "meaning" to the "word" in "quotes".

But in this case, it's correct, because the intention is to place suspicion on the word 'advances'.

Maybe you ought to make a new year's resolution to reduce the number of things that bother you. It'd be better on the rest of us who are constantly reading your dumb pet peeves. Hate to be a grammar Nazi my ass, you love it.

"Your suggesting, then, that bold-faced type or other forms of often inappropriately-selected HTML markup is a superior method of adding emphasis or delineating portions of one's comments?"

Yes. Quotation marks, in case you missed it, are for demarcating *quotations*, much as I have done above. To use them otherwise, regardless of what limitations the medium might have, really only serves to show that you probably haven't been paying attention.

I believe distributed.net's [distributed.net] client was the first program of its type to download information from a remote server, use idle cpu cycles to calculate whatever, then resubmit it back to the central server. I ran distributed.net back in 98, more then a year before seti came out.

"We know this method works! On 19 October 1997 at 1325 UTC, we found the correct solution for RSA Labs' 56-bit secret-key challenge. (That's RC5-32/12/7 56-bit for you stats junkies.) The key was 0x532B744CC20999, and it took us 250 days to locate."

General purpose queueing systems have been around a loong loong looooonngg time; 20, 30, 40 years. Distributed.net and SETI simply expanded the concept to include other people's computers. Hell, NASA produced a freely available and popular one in the 80s called NQS which is still available.

I have to laugh at the thought that all this "Grid" and distributed stuff is new.

Yes, this is absolutely true. GIMP was around when d.net started and they're still going strong today. There was also Rocke Verser's DESCHALL group which had a head start on distributed.net by a couple months, but they shut down when they completed the RSA Labs DES challenge.

Seti came well over a year later.

For d.net, at least, our first assigned block was in early March 1997.

Distributed computing toolkits go back AT LEAST to 1973 and before with DCS. It's not like the d.net client was the first one I or someone else ever wrote. That's why it only took us a couple weeks from when Genx pulled the plug to write what whould be known as the d.net client.

But yes, SETI does always claim to be the first.

They are claiming to be the first "multi-project" client too, but you all remember picking between DES and RC5 I'm sure:) Folding@home and others are multi-project too, and that was

Judge: "What do you have to say about the virus you created, young man?"

Virii writer: "It wasn't a virus, your honor. It was really a non-permission-based propagation model for a distributed computing application that involved producing the results of decreased uptime and further propagation of the non-permission-based distributed application."

This only works if one is using one's computer for personal reasons and contributing the wasted cyles to the cause. If one leaves the computer on only to do the calucations than one is paying more for the electricity to run the program than the calculations are worth. I refer to the $5 million dollar supercomputer at Virginia Tech. This computer can do 8 trillion calculations a second. Now how many pc would it take to equal that and than caculate the cost of electricity for that amount of pc's. Now the

I'd like to see a distributed computing app that can be used to both do the work (like the current ones do), AND optionally have the ability to submit a task.
This way you could have a world wide supercomputer that everybody would have a chance to employ.
Very few people would probably use it, but it would be very interesting to see the ways in which different people put it to use.

I've been thinking about something like this all semester in my Distributed Computing class.

What I'd really like to see is a system setup where you have a network of clients, any of whom can dispatch an agent across the system that consumes resources to accomplish some goal.

Obviously there would have to be some sort of non-malicious code signing or sandboxing going on within the system, as well as forcing the agents to consume proportional resources (ie the more time/space/bandwidth you give to the syt

Add some sort of payment to the mix, and it might work. You get CCredits for doing computations and pay C(ompute)Credits to get something computed. Projects have to acquire CCredits for their computations by some kind of authority, commercial ones for real money, good cause / scientific ones for free. Clients can then use their CCredits for their own projects (a la your "submit a task"), or (if coming from a commercial project) cash them in or donate them to a good cause. At some kind of exchange the client

Most distributed computing projects are distributed because they need massive amounts of CPU cycles. Running multiple projects on one machine isn't going to make the projects faster since the same amount of CPU cycles are now being divided up amongst the number of projects that you're running. Infact it'll actually be less because now the machine has to deal with the overhead of switching between project processes.

On the other hand it might make sense if you were running a CPU-intensive project and a data-intensive project at the same time (ie projects that will maximize separate non-conflicting resources on the same machine..)

I realize that BOINC won't necessarily be running projects concurrently on one client machine, but the point remains the same. There is not a very significant advantage to having something like this. It's not like Stanford is running out of data for Folding@Home.. (which would be the only reason that you would need to switch projects..)

Well....the processors in my computers are OWNED by me. I pay the electricity bills to operate them, and YOU want to use my processor time for FREE ?? I dont think so, pony up some cash or keep your distributed clients, thank you.

"Well....the processors in my computers are OWNED by me. I pay the electricity bills to operate them, and YOU want to use my processor time for FREE ?? I dont think so, pony up some cash or keep your distributed clients, thank you."

I run SETI on my PC all the time. Its cheaper for me to leave the computer on at all times and use it to maintain a consistent temperature during the winter with it than to crank on than the apartment's electrical heater...:)

"hey, that's right! electricity turns into heat energy at the same rate, no matter what it did in the meantime. so for every watt of power your computer uses, that's one less watt of power your heater needs to crank out. (assuming you have it on a thermostat, and that the computer isn't hot enough to heat the room above its ideal temperature, and that air flow in your home is good enough that the heat from the computer affects the whole house)"

I know one of the reasons they created BOINC is that the current SETI@home clientbase is very rigid and can only process data from one telescope -- Aricebo. I also know that the commandline client is tons faster than the screensaver-based client. Is BOINC's flexiblity going to end up making BOINC clients slower than the current dedicated clients?

is that that the screensaver is only less efficient when displaying its graphs?? how does it compare to the command line versin once the screensaver switches to go to blank mode (thats a setting directly in the screensaver not just a power save of the monitor....)

how does it compare to the command line versin once the screensaver switches to go to blank mode

I'm not sure what happens when the screensaver switches off. However, I do know that when using SETI@Home on a P4c (with HT) and the SETI window is brought to the front, the processor usage shoots up from 50% to 100%. Maybe this is due to a separate thread being spawned that can be used on the second logical processor. I'm not sure.

This is one thing I would like about the new system, the ability to run mo

I'm sure that spammers will be registering their distributed spam/DDoS zombies [theregister.co.uk] real soon. Why sneak the software onto machines when you can get people to sign up for it if you provide fancy ratings and team standings? Throw in some t-shirts and blue pills and they're gold!

This may be great for a few high profile applications that users are willing to support. But the Globus Toolkit OGSA project has higher ambitions OGSA [globus.org] and arguably a better chance of making a difference in the next generation of the WWW.

From my understanding, Boinc uses OpenGL to unload the screensaver graphics off the main processor's load and onto the graphics card GPU just like how Mac OS X accelerates its GUI graphics (or how Longhorn will do it with DirectX). Too bad Boinc can't uses the GPU like what was covered here on Slashdot under the BrookGPU project yesterday...

"Some people have expressed interest in getting BOINC to do that. It may happen."

Good, because I'm interested in seeing how many gigaflops my old Pentium 133 would produce with five (5) Voodoo1 cards filling up all the available PCI slots. My friends and I have plenty of spare old videocards to donate to such an endeavour...:)

I downloaded bonic in January 2003 after reading Prey [amazon.com] by Michael Crichton. You have to read a lot of documentation to get going because you must work within their framework. After fiddling for several hours I gave up, because I didn't think many people would bother to run my distributed "Hello, World" application. You see, each client computes the ASCII value for a character in the string, the server then reasembles them and prints it on the server. It greatly reduces the work required to display output on

Much more interesting than SETI@HOME is the SIC@HOME [gamma.nic.fi] project, the search for incredible coincidences.

A radio tuned to static is used to feed a stream of random data to a soundcard. The data is used to construct an image, and in the incredibly unlikely event that this image matches a predetermined image, you've proven that the universe is infinite!:-)

I agree with you and there already is a Java sub-culture doing just that - the Jini and JavaSpaces community [jini.org]. Highly distributed, self-healing, self-forming federations of services and distributed shared memory realms. Combine it with say Java WebStart [sun.com] for distribution and/or RIO [jini.org] for dynamic provisioning and you have one hell of a powerful distributed computing platform. And, because of the Java sandbox and the new Jini 2.0 security features, on that can be make sharing mobile code relatively safe. Throw in

For my Honors thesis, I produced a general-purpose platform-independent distributed computing system with the added benefit of presence awareness/work accounting. (As in it immediately reassigns your work unit when you go offline, rather than waiting indefinitely for you to return the results. This is reasonable because almost everyone who would run a distributed computing client has a 24/7 Internet connection.) See the PDF version of my thesis [theari.com] for more information.

NUMA is great for dedicated machines, but general purpose machines lending out RAM to other systems? Get real, you'd be better off with a BFO page space.

Remote RAM has to be instantly available and it can't go away. Shitty isn't the word for it when we're talking about using general purpose networking kit like gigabit for NUMA. Utterly unusable and waste of time are the best words to describe it. You need SCI, Myrinet or similar to get shitty performance.

It's a pointless exercise. People use RAM because it's fast. NUMA RAM is *not* fast, in fact, unless you are using a high performance, low latency proprietary network it's slower than paging to local disk. It's just like running an NFS paging space and that's just horrible.

For dedicated servers with high performance interconnects it sucks pretty badly compared to local RAM, for general purpose desktops and servers over ethernet and oh my god TCP/IP on top it's just taking the piss.

"Not that they need extra hardware, but imagine the resulting credits list if they had to list everyone whose computer rendered a few frames of (the Hobbit? The tales of Narnia?)..."

I'd rather contribute my cycles to Lucasfilm/ILM in the attempt to use spare CPU cycles to virtually write a better screenplay than Episode I. Yes, I know, its an analogy to 1,000 monkeys at typewriters...:)

Actually, I like that idea. I was thinking about that a couple of weeks ago, something like Weta or ILM creating a di

"Episode 1 was slightly worse than Episode II, which was semi-fun to watch, with nostalgia for Episode IV, but not great. Episode III at least promises we get to see that leering Christian What's-'is-name dipped in acid. The sooner the better."

Episode II was more to Episode V than *Star Trek Nemesis* was to *The Wrath of Khan.*:)